(mellow music) - [Narrator] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project, Civics, Patriotism and America's Prospects.

This week.

- What we're trying to do as civics educators is to prepare students to live in the world as mature adult citizens and indoctrinating them does nothing to allow them to do so.

- [Narrator] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, and now, a panel on America at 250 Civic Education And Upcoming Anniversaries of the Founding with Jonathan Gienapp, Associate Professor of History and Law at Stanford University and Elizabeth Kaufer Busch, Co-Director of the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University.

- The task as I see it as a teacher of this period is to try to present the period in such a way that one, it can invite people from all sorts of different backgrounds and points of view into the conversation while two, stressing things about the period that are surprising, ironic, and/or complex such that everybody involved ends up feeling unsettled and surprised.

Nobody can settle for easy answers.

So whether students feel drawn to the founding or alienated from it, whether or not they wanna uncritically venerate it, or just completely tear it all down, or whether as is usually the case, people fall in between on trying to figure out what they think, the goal is always to try to get to move them past the familiar to something that is genuinely surprising.

And I try to accomplish that by underscoring the era's dynamism.

The founding was not a static set of ideas or a distinct moment in time that we can freeze and investigate.

It was a process that unfolded over time and was propelled by real people engaged in civic work.

So to get at this, I stress that the founding was first and foremost a debate over things that are the most important things one could debate.

What it means to be free, what it means to be equal, the very point of constitutional government, what it means to make the people sovereign and to live out the ideal of self-government, who Americans are and who they ought to be.

At the time of the founding, answers to these questions varied, debates over them were charged, contentious and often divisive.

They were conducted by imperfect people because all people are imperfect, but they were also inclusive and empowering.

By staking the nation to a set of broad principles, what the American Revolution had the effect of doing was empowering virtually everybody, including those traditionally shut out from power to claim the revolution and its founding for themselves to take up Thomas Paine's charge to quote, "Begin the world over again."

So among the things the founding did is it set up a set of genuinely public markers that set in motion an enduring debate over them, a debate that raged and has really never stopped.

So it created a distinct kind of civic conversation with clear enough parameters to give it shape, but enough indeterminacy running through it to allow for plenty of play and creativity.

And out of that conversation came our most important civic symbols.

Those didn't just spring forth, they had to be made.

So I try to show students that it was through debates over them and the meanings that those debates generated, that the symbols that we share came to be.

And I think they're really valuable civic lessons that follow from adopting this kind of dynamic perspective.

If we see the founding as a dynamic conversation that did not end, it's easier for people to imagine themselves joining it.

It's not just something that you either passively receive or actively contest.

It's instead something that you can participate in and shape.

And then two, it underscores that it was a struggle and therefore an achievement to build an enduring constitutional republic out of that disagreement.

Again, that didn't just happen either, and it was not done in a way that ensured its future success.

Nothing could ensure that.

From debate disagreement and even rancor came a shared tradition with common symbols, one that was made ever more powerful and durable because of that vigorous civic activity of arguing through and under the very idea of a common founding.

So the civic symbols at once channeled those debates, but were also the byproduct of them.

America's founding documents came to be venerated because they were actively put to work in civic debate.

That was certainly true of the United States Constitution.

Getting it ratified by the summer of 1787 had required a bruising political flight in which nearly half of the American political public, those who were called anti-Federalists, had opposed ratifying the Constitution and not lightly either.

They had spent nearly a year saying time and again that the proposed constitution was a complete betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution.

But what followed, however, was pretty remarkable.

Rather than rejecting the Constitution's legitimacy, its former critics instead fought over how to interpret it.

They laid claim to it for themselves and they made it accountable as best they could to what they thought the revolution had been about.

So debates over the decade that followed through the 1790s over how to interpret the Constitution raged often in bitter and divisive ways, but they all ran through and under the Constitution.

So who was the decisive winner to emerge from this process was almost certainly the Constitution itself.

The activity of appealing to it as a common source of authority was what helped make it one.

Now how much the Constitution should be venerated was also something that was actively on the minds of the founding generation.

They were deeply, deeply, deeply attuned to the problem of how it was that a constitution could endure.

It's one thing to set one up, it's another thing to ensure that it endures.

They recognized that Americans needed to strike and cultivate the right balance between venerating a constitution and emphasizing its inherent imperfections, a balancing act that was captured so perfectly well as was the case of so many things by James Madison.

So as we approached the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, as we strive to revitalize our own civic culture, I think by understanding how the founding generation themselves understood that founding and how they understood that it was just the beginning by seeing that it was a debate that never ended or could or should end.

And by understanding how the sorts of unifying symbols needed to sustain our civic culture were made through the struggles and claims of that culture.

By seeing the founding, in other words, dynamically in motion, I think it becomes a whole lot easier to create the conditions today for the kind of shared disagreement that is essential to a pluralist democracy like ours.

And when I'm trying to teach these subjects to a group of students from all sorts of different ideological backgrounds, that is what I try to promote in hopes that it will invite them into a conversation and recognize that it is above all that a conversation.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) - How do you teach a contested historical narrative and how do we commemorate the past?

And these are almost one and the same when you think in terms of the upcoming 250th anniversary.

So my answer to this question is that first of all, let's look at what the 250th anniversary is commemorating.

It's the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

It's not the anniversary of the Constitution.

So what are we celebrating?

Well, that depends on what kind of document that you think the Declaration of Independence is.

What do we think this document is attempting to achieve?

And we're in an era where we have two irreconcilable views of what this document allegedly says.

So my talk is going to contrast what I call the founding ideals of the Declaration, or I collectively term this the American proposition with what I'm going to term in anti-constitutionalist, an irreconcilable worldview adopted in many classrooms today.

And I'm going to argue that professors of civics should accurately portray both worldviews.

I don't think it's appropriate to try to push one worldview and destroy the other because what we're trying to do as civics educators is to prepare students to live in the world as mature adult citizens and indoctrinating them does nothing to allow them to do so to maneuver in the world in an appropriate way.

So let's just very basically look at the contested historical narrative as I understand it.

21st century America is a house divided.

We aren't divided today over policy disputes.

It would be great if we could get back to actually disputing policy.

The real rift in our country right now as I see it, is that we are split between two irreconcilable worldviews.

One, I call the American proposition and the other...

So my co-author and I are debating over semantics here.

So I like the term anti-constitutionalists.

He likes the term rejectionist, but you get the gist.

I also tend to describe it in terms of an oppressor oppressed paradigm.

So I will lay that out.

What is the American proposition?

And this comes from the Declaration.

The Declaration, as was said earlier in this conference is the why.

Why do we exist?

Why do we come together?

You know, we are not like other nations brought together by a singular race, by a singular ethnicity, by a singular religion.

We are built on ideas.

And that's part of the uniqueness of the American experiment.

So we need to ask what those ideas are, and we need to understand what those ideas are.

Humans are equal and they have unalienable rights.

That's proposition number one.

Proposition number two, government is needed due to human imperfection.

And I'm glad we're using the same term because I think it's the right note.

And the constitution must limit the leaders and also the people.

So we can't do whatever we want, even though we are the foundation of the government's authority.

What we have today in response to this are anti-constitutionalists or rejectionists, both on the left and on the right.

And this is very generic so I'm gonna give a layout.

Anti-constitutionalists believe the ends justify the means.

So you don't have to confine yourself to constitutional limitations, process requirements and the like.

So that means they're going to, you know, in the words of our president, "I'm gonna support this even though it might not pass constitutional muster," right?

That means things like violent protests are appropriate and we have this on the left and the right.

You know, it does skew one direction more than the other.

As long as their goal is just they can follow whatever means and just is in the eye of the beholder.

So whoever's, you know, pushing for their particular policy or worldview, they define what is just.

So the most prominent version of this anti-constitutionalism is the oppressor oppressed paradigm, which I will get to.

First, let me get a little deeper into what the American proposition is.

The first premise that humans are equal and endowed with unalienable rights lead to a couple of more specific observations in the Declaration.

First of all, these unalienable rights come from a creator and/or nature.

I think the constitution is broad enough to include a secular worldview, a view based on human nature, a view based on an omnipotent God.

It does not specify that one or the other of those principles are needed.

But it does specify there's some sort of principle above human choice that has determined that.

The equality is in a very specific sense in the possession of rights.

And finally, the only proper end of government then is to protect these rights.

That's as the Declaration puts forth.

Our second premise that we need government, right?

Governments are instituted to protect these rights.

Well, why the heck do we need a government in the first place?

Well, there's some kind of problem in human nature or we would be able to get along and you know, it doesn't even require that many humans to make a problem for the rest of us.

So humans are imperfect.

Now to some, that's gonna mean sinful.

To some, that's gonna mean fallen.

And to others, that's going to mean we're corrupt, we're naturally evil, selfish.

And to some it's gonna be we just make mistakes.

But all of those are encapsulated in that.

Our rights are only going to be secure with some form of government.

The authority for this government can only come from us.

It comes from the consent of the governed.

And again, we, the people who consent to form this government are not perfect ourselves.

Our government leaders are also human beings.

They may not seem so today, but they are, and they're imperfect as well.

So we need to devise mechanisms that control and limit the government and control and limit we, the people.

So there is an irony that we give the authority to this eventual constitution and we adhere to it and it has a status above we, the people, and yet we, the people gave it its authority.

So there is a paradox there.

And finally, governments exist to pursue justice or the common good, and justice, the oppressed define what that is because the oppressors have no sense of justice.

They define justice as equity or a new sense of empowering the oppressed because they have experienced a lack of power and therefore they have a justification not only for redefining it, but they're morally correct because they're able through their oppression to see the reality of the situation.

And they perhaps can pave the way for utopian notion of society and/or utopian notion of humanity.

And this means we can put in place experts, they can correct us.

There's often an openness or a lack of specifics on what ultimately this is going to look like.

But there's a fundamental difference in the limitations of human nature in the American proposition and the openness to change human beings.

And on the one side, you really need to show both because they're irreconcilable and students, adults, all of us have to see which side we find more persuasive, all right?

So once we get a clearer view of these two worldviews, we can better understand the nature of debate today.

What's really dangerous and troubling in our society is not a particular policy dispute.

We can't even get to that 'cause we can't even agree on the plane by which we're disagreeing.

We can't even agree that we need to follow law and process.

We can't even agree that the constitution is the law of the land.

And so we need to have that conversation first and then we can get in the weeds of policy.

(upbeat music) (audience clapping) - Thank you so much to both of you for such thought provoking talks.

I want to turn first to Professor Gienapp.

I often think about the Declaration of Independence as a political document and you were talking about its invocation as a legal document.

I'm wondering if you think there are constitutional issues today that would be better illuminated if we thought about them in the context of the Declaration of Independence as a kind of almost binding or quasi binding legal document that could inform how we think about the constitutional text?

- That's a big question.

I think if nothing else, I think something we have lost that was alive and well in the founding generation was an understanding of the synergy between the blueprint and its means of execution.

So part of the way the Declaration of Independence receives its legal status is because most of the state constitutions, many of them directly copied parts of the Declaration of Independence into them.

But all of them took what they took to be its guiding principles and laid them down as its basis.

But they also had a way of understanding how a constitutional document was unfolding and what it was referenced to that we don't easily see as much now.

So the original meaning of a constitution referred to the frame of government, which rested upon a social compact, I think it would be very useful as a civic conversation to invite people to draw more of these connections between the Declaration of Independence, the preamble of the US Constitution, the state constitutions.

Remember, we have 51 constitutions in this country, not one and to see the synergy 'cause they saw the synergy and sometimes we don't.

- Thank you.

In calling as you have admirably for I think a more intellectually honest approach, one that grapples with the complexity of the American experiment, why is it that it seems difficult for people to assume a posture that's open to that kind of complexity?

And as we look ahead to the 250th anniversary, what can we do to try to encourage people to be open to engaging with a very difficult topic?

- Yeah, I think unfortunately one of the problems has been that teachers both at the K-12 and at the university level see their jobs differently than many used to.

Not necessarily purveyors of content, they perhaps have some sort of social justice motivation in mind.

And that's what I mean by the formulation of teach don't preach because if we really want to participate in civics as teachers, right, and to teach the civic lessons out there, we need to allow students to have the dialectic in their own mind, between opposing views.

And I will also say as a side note, that this oppressor oppressed philosophy is one way of being an anti-constitutionalist.

And there are a number of different types of anti-constitutionalists on the right.

These folks also see that the ends justify the means.

Some of them are the Catholic integralists, some of them are the common good constitutional.

They go by a number of different names and they seek to impose a particular view of common good or justice through extra constitutional methods, I would say.

And the oppressor oppressed tends to be more prevalent on the left, that particular formulation of it.

I think this honest conversation between the two is really the only way to crack into the minds of students who are absolutely 100% sure their view of our country is correct.

And unfortunately we have more and more people who have that absolute certainty, which is just an anomaly to me because I've never had absolute certainty about anything as an academic.

And so you have to do what Socrates did so well, which is be their friend, adopt the idea, talk to them about why it's so persuasive.

Why is this so persuasive?

Why is this so attractive to believe we can liberate ourselves from the ugliness we see around us?

- A figure I think could easily be brought into the conversation here is Herbert Storing, a professor at University of Chicago when he conceived of this thought that the anti-Federalists writings ought to be collected.

Further, he should produce and edit a one volume edition of the best of the anti-Federalists writings, which the anti-Federalists didn't do, right?

Hamilton is the architect of the Federalist Publius because Storing argued the United States arose from debate.

In particular, he's thinking about the 1787 Constitution, but it's true of the Declaration as well.

And he writes in this marvelous essay what the anti-Federalists are for.

I think that someone will remind me.

I think that's where it is.

- Yes, it's fantastic.

- He thinks the Federalist had the better of the argument, but you can't really understand America and even be sure that the Federalists had the better of the argument unless you know the anti-Federalists argument.

Is that in fact the spirit of what you are... And just, this is not postmodernism or post-structuralism, there's a parameter, there are parameters to this.

There are common principles, there's a shared arena of argument, but there is argument there so if you would respond.

- Yeah, thank you.

I think that's exactly right.

The one thing I would slightly amend that I emphasize to students is from the perspective of 1787, you could certainly argue that the anti-federalists, if they didn't have the better argument, they had the easier argument to make the more conventional argument, the one more rooted in what was persuasive.

The rhetorical challenge was on the Federalist side because the claim that this proposed constitution violates the principles of the American Revolution was a claim that had substance.

Every thoughtful person who'd ever been referred to as an authority on politics had made it clear that republics had to exist over a small space with a relatively homogeneous society.

So from Montesquieu on down, that was proof positive that you couldn't have an extended republic.

So the challenge that the Federalists faced, they could have either said, well, we were committed to a set of principles on which we waged the revolution.

Those haven't quite worked.

We'll abandon them.

Or to do a creative act of reconciliation out of genuine innovation and to show how not only was an extended republic consistent with the revolutionary principles, but as Madison argues in Federalist 10 is a much better device for redeeming them.

And this was true of a number of...

I mean you can run down sort of the list of how anti-Federalists really leveraged the spirit of 1776 to indict 1787.

But the only reason those Federalist arguments existed is because they had to answer this charge.

I mean, why does the Federalist Papers exist?

They are position papers in the New York press with the sole purpose of ensuring a majority of the New York Ratifying convention to answer the attacks that are being made in that same New York press first and foremost by Brutus, whoever that might be.

We still struggle to all agree on who wrote some of these things, but they're answers, right?

And as I think we all know, what is the value of exchange and conversation and debate is not simply that you get rival points of view on the table, it's that each of us gets a better understanding of what we actually think and why from that process.

It's generative, it sharpens, it brings something that's latent to the surface and gives it a form that it would've previously lacked.

The arguments in the Federalist papers are that.

So if they are right moving forward, as in they're saying something that's essentially true of not just our system, but republican government more generally, many of them wouldn't have existed in the formulation they did without the anti-Federalists hammering them on why this thing that the Philadelphia Convention had done was a break from conventional orthodoxy that therefore required a response that explained why it was not, why they had not left the cave, but only expanded it.

And that's really important I think.

- Moreover, they can help us understand some of our shortcomings today.

They were extremely wise.

It amazes me how far into the future they could see.

I would amend your comment just a little bit to say, not giving up on the principles, but giving up on how, the design, right?

How to achieve those principles.

But one can look to those different arguments and still weigh well, maybe that would've been better.

And I would say at our critical points in American history, we can find analogous debate, not over how to shape the constitution, but how to bring about civil rights, how to overcome the failings of slavery, how to live up to the principles in a way that we have failed.

- Please join me in thanking our wonderful panelists today.

(audience clapping) - [Narrator] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

(upbeat music)